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El catálogo completo de lugares aprobados. Ordénalo por valoración, novedad o debate, y acótalo por categoría.
79 lugares
Cropsey
A children's bogeyman with a hook, told on Staten Island for generations — until children began disappearing in the neighbourhood in the 1980s and it emerged that a former orderly from the abandoned Willowbrook school was living beside it. Willowbrook was a real institution, closed after a 1972 investigation exposed appalling conditions. A rare and unpleasant case of a local bogeyman and a documented local history meeting at the same point on the map.
Krasue
A flying woman's head with its viscera trailing beneath — one of the most recognisable images in mainland Southeast Asian folklore, known in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos under different names. By day she is an ordinary woman; at night the head detaches and goes looking for food. Her appearance was traditionally linked to night lights over rice paddies and to sickness in livestock. In Thailand she has been the subject of dozens of films and remains a living figure of popular culture rather than a museum entry.
The Pontianak
A woman who died in childbirth and came back for revenge — one of the central figures of Malay and Indonesian folklore. Her presence is identified by smell: first the sweetness of frangipani, then the smell of a corpse. She is held to live in banana trees, which is why they are not planted right against a house. The city of Pontianak in Borneo carries her name: by tradition its founder laid out the settlement on the spot where he drove these spirits off.
El Silbón, the Whistler
A tall figure with a sack of bones on its back, wandering the plains of Venezuela and Colombia. The rule is known to everyone in the llanos and works the wrong way round: if the whistle sounds close, he is far away; if it is barely audible, he is already beside you. The legend works as a warning and as an explanation — for people lost in the savannah, and for the sounds that carry for miles across open grassland at night and deceive the ear.
Kuchisake-onna, the slit-mouthed woman
A woman in a surgical mask stops a passer-by and asks: am I beautiful? Say yes and she takes the mask off, revealing a mouth slit to the ears, and asks again. The legend erupted in the spring of 1979 in Gifu Prefecture and crossed the whole of Japan within months: schools sent children home in groups, police stepped up patrols, newspapers reported the panic. The roots are older, going back to the Edo period, but the 1979 version was the country's first case of an urban legend requiring a police response.
Bunny Man Bridge
A single-track railway underpass in Fairfax County, Virginia, known locally as Bunny Man Bridge. The legend puts a man in a rabbit suit with an axe here. There is a real basis and it is a modest one: in October 1970 county police logged two reports of a man in a white suit with rabbit ears who swung an axe at people near their cars and broke a window in a house under construction. He was never found. In half a century two police reports have grown into hanged children, an escaped asylum patient and a compulsory visit to the bridge on Halloween night.
The Askinskaya Ice Cave
A cave in Bashkortostan with a single chamber holding ice columns up to eleven metres tall, grown over centuries. The temperature stays below freezing all year: cold air flows in during winter and cannot get out. Bashkir tradition places a guardian spirit here, to whom offerings were left at the mouth. In the 2010s visitor numbers damaged some of the columns and the cave was closed to open access.
The Blue Stone
A twelve-ton boulder on the shore of Lake Pleshcheyevo, a shrine to the Merya people and then to the Slavs. The church fought it for centuries: it was buried, sunk in the lake, and hauled on a sledge to be used in a bell tower's foundation — the sledge went through the ice, and decades later the stone was back on the shore. There is a physical explanation too: ice movement and washed-out ground push the boulder up. The name comes from the colour, which turns blue when wet.
The Salbyk Kurgan
A royal kurgan in Khakassia ringed by upright slabs of Devonian sandstone weighing up to fifty tons — the stone was hauled seventy kilometres. Before excavation the mound stood twenty-five metres high. Inside was a burial with several attendants, killed, to all appearances, for the purpose. The valley around it is called the Valley of the Kings: there are several dozen kurgans here and most are untouched.
Mount Belukha
The highest point of the Altai, which the Altaians call Uch-Sumer and hold to be forbidden: one did not climb it, or speak loudly at its foot. Nicholas Roerich came here in 1926 and tied the mountain to Belovodye and Shambhala; his paintings made Belukha the centre of a Russian esoteric pilgrimage that has not dried up. The peak stands almost equidistant from three oceans — a fact the esotericists are fond of citing.
Ayu-Dag, the Bear Mountain
A volcano that never happened on Crimea's south coast: the magma rose but never broke out and set as a dome. From the sea the mountain reads as an enormous bear drinking. A Crimean legend takes that literally — the leader of a bear pack turned to stone, punished for trying to drink the sea dry rather than let a runaway girl go. Remains of a medieval monastery and fortifications survive on it, and the magnetic field in places pulls a compass off true.
The Onega Petroglyphs and the Demon
Carvings on the shore rocks of Lake Onega, cut five or six thousand years ago. The best-known figure is the Bes — a humanoid nearly two and a half metres tall, split down the middle by a natural fissure. Monks of the Murom monastery cut a Christian cross over it in the fifteenth century to neutralise it, and both marks remain side by side on the stone, which makes this rock a rare document of one faith writing over another.
The Solovetsky Labyrinths
Boulder spirals on the Solovetsky Islands, laid out three or four thousand years ago. There are around thirty, the largest twenty-five metres across. There are no branches — one winding path to the centre and back. The accepted explanation ties them to burial rites and to keeping a soul from finding its way back to the living: stone heaps with burnt bone are found beside them.
The Kapova Cave (Shulgan-Tash)
A cave in Bashkortostan with wall paintings some seventeen thousand years old — mammoths, horses, rhinoceroses, laid down in ochre. Before its discovery in 1959 Palaeolithic painting was thought to exist only in Western Europe. In the Bashkir epic Ural-batyr the lake at its mouth is the entrance to the underworld, ruled by Shulgan, the hero's brother who went over to evil. The cave and the lake carry his name.
Orheiul Vechi
The limestone canyon of the Răut in Moldova, with a cave monastery cut into its sheer walls — cells, a chapel and a bell tower joined by passages through the rock. Monks lived here from the thirteenth century; the Soviet authorities closed it, and until the 1990s a single hermit remained in the caves. Below on the slope lie traces of Geto-Dacian fortifications and of a Golden Horde town that stood on the same ground.
Białowieża Forest
The last large stand of primeval lowland forest in Europe, on the Belarus–Poland border — what the whole continent was before the clearances. A wild herd of bison grazes here, rebuilt from some fifty animals after the last free-living one was shot in 1921. The trees reach fifty metres and some of the oaks are older than the Commonwealth. Baltic and Slavic mythology filled such forests with leshys and wood-maidens, and the guides here are happy to keep that going.
Gobustan
A rock massif outside Baku with more than six thousand petroglyphs, the oldest up to forty thousand years old. The gaval dash stands here too — the tambourine stone, a slab that gives a resonant note when struck and was evidently played. Thor Heyerdahl visited three times and argued that the boats depicted are related to Norwegian petroglyphs, deriving a Caucasian origin for the Scandinavians — a hypothesis specialists did not accept.
Lake Sevan
A high-altitude lake that supplies almost all of Armenia's fresh water. In Soviet times its level was deliberately dropped by nearly twenty metres for hydroelectricity, and what lay beneath came out: Bronze Age settlements, fortresses and necropolises. The Sevan peninsula was an island before that draining. The monastery of Sevanavank was founded in 874 by Princess Mariam, and tradition has it built by monks exiled from Echmiadzin for misconduct.
Lake Issyk-Kul
A non-freezing mountain lake in the Tien Shan with several drowned settlements beneath it, from Saka times through the middle ages. Divers have brought up bronze cauldrons, coins and courses of brickwork. One legend ties the lake to Tamerlane's grave, another to a monastery of Armenian brothers where, according to the Catalan Atlas of 1375, the relics of the apostle Matthew were kept. The last is taken seriously enough that expeditions still work the lake.
The Stone Graves
Granite ridges rising out of the flat Azov steppe like an island. By one account the Battle of the Kalka was fought here in 1223, and three captured princes were laid under a platform on which the Mongols feasted until they suffocated. The steppe around was for centuries set with stone women — Cuman figures raised over graves, of which only a fraction survives.
Nan Madol
A city of ninety-two artificial islets built off Pohnpei in Micronesia from basalt columns weighing up to fifty tons, stacked like logs without mortar. How they were moved is unknown; local tradition says sorcerers made the stones fly. The city was abandoned around 1628. Pohnpeians consider the place dangerous and say one does not sleep there — a chief who tried, the account goes, was dead by morning.
Wadi Rum
A sandstone desert in southern Jordan that the Bedouin call the Valley of the Moon. Its rocks carry twenty-five thousand petroglyphs and twenty thousand inscriptions, the oldest twelve thousand years old. Bedouin tradition fills the gorges with jinn, and the place obliges: the temperature difference between sun and shade reaches twenty degrees, and in the narrow canyons your own footsteps come back with a delay.
Monte Nemrut
Una cima del sureste de Turquía donde Antíoco I de Comagene se hizo construir una tumba en el siglo I a. C. y levantó estatuas de nueve metros de los dioses y de sí mismo. Los terremotos separaron las cabezas de los cuerpos, y ahora yacen aparte en las terrazas, mirando en direcciones distintas. La tumba nunca se ha encontrado: el túmulo de grava suelta no se puede excavar sin que se derrumbe.
Bahía de Ha Long
Mil quinientas islas calizas en el golfo de Tonkín. El nombre significa dragón que desciende: según la tradición, los dioses enviaron dragones para defender a los vietnamitas de los invasores, y estos escupieron perlas y jade que se convirtieron en las islas. Aparte están los relatos de marineros sobre una criatura marina que los oficiales coloniales franceses dijeron ver en la bahía en la década de 1890.